Seaport, South Boston Seaport, South Boston Waterfront, Fort Point Channel, and last but not least, Innovation District. Might we have a bit of an identity crisis here?

Battles over what to name the sprawling, parking-lot-covered, waterfront acreage around Boston’s Fan Pier and the new federal courthouse have raged for years now.

But even as the area slowly but surely gets built out, from the massive Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to office and apartment high-rises, its name and identity remain in flux, a plaything for political bigwigs to toy with.

The naming merry-go-round is certainly amusing – that is, in a third-world, banana republic sense, in which the latest strongman gets naming rights to the capital.

“People are still trying to get a handle on what to call it,” Vivien Li, director of the Boston Harbor Association, noted rather diplomatically.

Who’s The Boss?

So what’s to blame for this branding fiasco?

Certainly City Hall’s big daddy, government-knows-best approach to development ranks right up there.

It all started in the 1990s, when City Hall and a few influential developers began laying out plans to fill in the parking lots around the new Moakley courthouse into what was touted as a new, and decidedly upscale, city neighborhood. The billionaire Pritzker hotel family was pushing plans to transform Fan Pier into an enclave for the rich, with lots of fancy condo towers surrounding a marina.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority, the cheerleader for the area’s redevelopment, released the Seaport Public Realm Plan, and soon, a new neighborhood name was born.

However, Seaport went over like a lead balloon among South Boston’s then powerful neighborhood leaders.

Southie’s strongmen back then knew a good shakedown opportunity when they saw it – there were millions in mitigation payments and other goodies to be reaped from all those rich waterfront developers.

The late Jimmy Kelly, the longtime city councilor, led what amounted to be a land grab, claiming what had long been a stretch of docks and industrial waterfront as long-lost Southie territory.

Kelly succeeded in convincing the City Council to officially rename the area the “South Boston Waterfront.” He badgered the city into putting up signs and even tried to get the press to tow the line by making increasingly irate calls to one reporter who persisted in using the name Seaport in his stories.

Kelly and his fellow South Boston pols thought the name game was settled in their favor, but the developers who had invested considerable money marketing the area as the Seaport had other ideas.

In a desperate bid to preserve some part of Seaport name, they came up with a compromise of sorts, South Boston Seaport.

Back To The Drawing Board

Meanwhile, City Hall shifted gears yet again, this time putting out another big development plan in 2002. This time, the Seaport theme was replaced with big ideas for “activating” the Fort Point Channel.

So Fort Point emerged as yet another place name for the area.

And so it went through the 2000s, as new buildings and development took shape along a stretch of Hub waterfront no one was really sure what to call anymore.

That is until last year, when Mayor Thomas M. Menino stepped in with yet another name.

By this time, all those developer dreams of scoring big with deluxe waterfront condos had run head first into the buzz saw of the housing downturn.

Instead, the mayor began promoting plans to attract tech startups from Cambridge to the funky old warehouses of Fort Point and the developments planned for all those parking lots next door around Fan Pier.

Goodbye Seaport, hello Innovation District.

Maybe the new name will stick – if nothing else, it reflects a time when good jobs are in and luxury condos are a reminder of a housing bubble that burst.

Yet there are already rumblings that Fort Point’s sizeable artist community feels pushed aside in favor of a few techies from Cambridge.

Still, something tells me we are going to be back at the naming drawing board before too long, especially if the Innovation District fails to take flight.

If so, it might then be time to try something truly radical for Boston, where top-down, old-style political boss-ism still holds sway.

Let the restaurateurs, entrepreneurs, artists – and yes, developers – who are helping turn all those warehouses and parking lots on the waterfront into a new neighborhood decide what they want to call it.

Frankly, it can’t get any more confusing than it already is.